Preparing for Confession When It Has Been A While...

In my last Conversion Story Post I was unsuccessfully searching for an adoration chapel firsthand... and instead Catholic Radio (Sacred Heart Radio on 740 AM) fell into my lap!  As I continued to stumble through work in a job that I did not enjoy nor fit in at, I continued to spend many hours silently reading about the Catholic faith on-line. I was very curious about the "Traditional Latin Mass" (or TLM) that my co-worker had introduced to me. I impulsively looked and was excited to find a TLM community in Dayton, Ohio, on the "wrong side of the tracks" so to speak, not close to where I live, but somewhere I could find if I was determined to get to... AND ...  there was Mass tonight at 7:30 pm... ah ha, something I could actually make on time, with my long commute from Cincinnati! The Holy Spirit was drawing me to do this! I felt a very strong desire to go. I thank God that I had the sense to know that if I was expected to cover my head to receive the Eucharist, well, then I better go to confession first because this was something special. Confessions were being offered before Mass!  My heart started beating faster, and I knew that I had to do this. I thought back to the last time we had been to Mass.. and I remembered ... our wedding day in 2001... and when our 2 1/2 year old was baptized... and maybe once or twice on other random occasions? My mother's funeral, my grandmother's funeral, and maybe a wedding in the past 7 or 8 years?  I had checked out several Protestant Non-denominational services over the years, and that is an entirely different blog post! But at this point, I had not been a regular practicing Catholic and I knew that was sinful. I tried to remember the last time I had been to Confession. Was it when I was 7 ? 10 ? I couldn't even remember how old I was. I googled "How to go to Confession" and ended up looking at the Ten Commandments as an Examination of Conscience. I actually pulled out a legal pad and began to make a list in my cubicle at work as I slowly went through each Commandment and put some thought into it. I started remembering all the stupid things I've done throughout my entire adolescence, and college years and even now. How selfish I have been and the times I have held onto anger against people in my own family. The times I have hurt my own body and soul in multitudes of ways and hurt others. Some things I cannot even put in writing out of shame that someone that I know will see and in someway hold it against me someday. The list was very long, indeed! I felt a very deep sense of sorrow! About an hour or two later I had filled up the entire page with a list of dumb, regrettable and foolish things I have done, said, felt, failed to do, and in some way let myself, others and God way down. It was quite humbling. I didn't know an Act of Contrition, so I had to copy that in the margin of the paper in really small print. It was already getting close to 5:00 pm.

My husband was calling to ask me when I was coming home from work and where were we going to go out for dinner tonight? He probably wanted to go have beer and wings at Fricker's, which is what we usually did on Friday nights.

   I told him, "Honey, tonight I have to work late." (I lied.)

   "How late?"  he wanted to know. (Annoyed.)

   "Very late.  I have a big project that I need to wrap up and it is going to take several hours."

   "OK, well call me when you are coming home." (Disappointed.)

   "OK, I will. I gotta run! Talk to you soon... Love you."

I could not explain to him what I was really planning to do because I felt that there was NO WAY that he would have accepted that at this time. (I underestimated him.)  It was just so alien to how we were living our secular life and it would probably just have pissed him off because it would have ruined his Friday night beer drinking. I was afraid to tell him what I was doing. I didn't want to get in an argument and I didn't want to be talked out of this. I quickly shut down my PC and packed up ready to go... I folded up my long list of sins and held it in my hand and walked quickly to my car...

*** I know this is long! I will continue my Conversion Story in an upcoming blog post! ***

How I discovered Catholic Radio

This is a continuation of my (long) reversion back to the Church... The beginning is HERE

I was perhaps confused... yet I continued to feel a strong pull to the Church and to Jesus. I still needed to discover what exactly this meant. (I am still discovering this today.)

I was still seeking out an opportunity to experience "Real" Eucharistic Adoration. I found yet another website while I was surfing the net at my desk at work during down time. I was excited to find a Catholic church a few miles from my office that had Eucharistic Adoration during lunch! Alright! Yes! I got in my car, and decided to take a long lunch that day.

I easily found the Church, feeling great.. walking up to the Church... and... nothing. The doors were locked! I could see children inside (this was a school) but they were near the front. I knocked quietly on the door, hoping to catch somebody's eye... I was too far back and nobody saw me to open the door. I stood there stupidly for about 5 minutes trying to get noticed, but I finally realized that this was futile and I wasn't going to get into this church... so I dejectedly turned around to leave.

God, I'm just trying to figure this out... why is it not happening, you know, like in the book?

Oh well, I thought, this is totally dumb.

I started my car and began to drive back to work. As I was turning out of the parking lot, I saw a simple sign stuck in the ground that said, "Sacred Heart Radio" 740 AM.

On that day I stopped listening to NPR during my 2 hour daily commute, and started listening to Catholic Radio. That was 5 years ago! It has been one of the best things I have ever done.

My next after work excursion was to be much more eventful...

Discovering the Real Church

This post is a continuation post about my story of reversion/conversion into the Catholic Church. You can catch the beginning of the story HERE.

At this point, I was still plowing through "Biblical Revelations" by Anne Catherine Emmerich, I had begun to "pray" in the only pathetic way I knew how to, and call out to God for help, and I began to listen to, and join in a little, with the religious conversations going on at work. I had a general understanding that my friend (who was attending a Latin Mass) was a different kind of Catholic than I had ever been exposed to, and was curious about this. I knew my only daughter was 2 and that continuing to live the selfish and gluttonous and carefree life that my husband and I were living was not right. We were not practicing any religion, and hadn't for years.

I was a contractor during this time, and my work load was very reduced. The projects I were assigned to had excess funding and a lot of downtime, and the client wanted me "available" (and paid me to be "available") but I personally did not have a whole lot to do. There were many days when I would be sitting at my desk for many hours waiting for files to be transferred, or waiting for someone to check in a software update, or for a script to complete which could take all day to run. Sometimes the boredom was overwhelming... but I didn't mind it one bit. I used every single spare moment during this time to surf the Internet and read about Catholicism. This went on for months. I was blessed with the opportunity to get paid a lot of money to sit at my desk and surf the Internet for the majority of my day looking up anything and everything about the Catholic church. I do believe this was the Holy Spirit at work providing me this avenue to enter back into the Church. Because, Our Lord only knows, there was not one religious influence that I, nor my husband had, amongst all our friends, family members or neighbors that we knew or were exposed to, that could have brought about this transformation. We were 100% secular in every way, and so was everyone else whom we associated with at home and in our neighborhood. He (God) had to take me a whole city away, to a job that I didn't want, in a field I didn't want to be in, in a situation that I was very uncomfortable in, around people that I didn't quite care for, quiet my mind, isolate me, humble me, and open my eyes and my heart so that I would finally hear. I just had no idea... So I began to surf the Internet. I found traditional Catholic sites and read and read and read. I realized that I really knew very little about the faith of my childhood. I remember being very floored that "The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass" was really that - an actual sacrifice. (And not just a memorial symbolic re-enactment of the last supper.) I mean, growing up "Catholic" I understood that the Eucharist is "really the body and blood" of Jesus, but I never understood. I never internalized it. I don't think I really ever thought about it or appreciated what this meant. I definitely took it for granted. Why didn't anyone explain this to me? I was confused. And I continued to surf the Internet all day. I read about the Saints. I read documents from the Council of Trent. I researched Papal history. I read about angels. I read private revelations of the Saints about Purgatory. And Hell. I researched Exorcisms. I read about Eucharistic Miracles. I read about the Marian Movement of Priests. I read about Garabandal. I found the Dimond Brothers website. I read Catholic prophesy. I found the fisheaters website. I read St. Bridget. I read the SSPX website. I read about how to pray the rosary. I pretty much read anything I could get my hands on, without really the ability to discern what was real and what wasn't, because it was all very new to me. I was beginning to understand the new term called "Eucharistic Adoration" and was curious about it. I became drawn to experience this "Eucharistic Adoration" and to see Jesus in a "monstrance". (I knew what a "monstrance" was - but only because it was on the cover of the book about the Real Presence that I mentioned in the prior post.) I had never seen one of these items before in my life. I felt robbed that here I was, 34 years old, and nobody had ever shown me these things before. If this was so important, than why didn't I know anything about this? Why the hell not? An unexplained hunger began to grow in my soul to experience this mysterious "Eucharistic Adoration" that I had never ever heard of before. I began to actually yearn in my heart to find the Real Presence of Christ in a monstrance! I barely understood what I was asking for, but the desire was there. And He had to be in a monstrance. It sounds so silly, but this desire was definitely there.

I found out the local suburban parish down the street was doing a "Eucharistic Adoration" night. I was excited and nervously, I decided to "check it out" on a Monday night after work. Even though I hadn't been to a church in a very long time. I went and was very disappointed to find a small gathering of older ladies singing some patriotic "God Bless America" and doing some devotion on rosary beads that I had never heard of before. It felt alien and uncomfortable to me. (It actually was the Divine Mercy Chaplet, but I did not know what this was at the time.) It just seemed very strange. And the most disappointing thing of all was that this "Adoration" was just the same old tabernacle in the same old 70's church. There was nothing exposed, no monstrance. It wasn't anything like what I was looking for, in my mind and felt a little creepy. There really was nothing there to Adore. If felt like a senior citizen prayer session in a dark empty church. It was a let down. I left that night feeling very confused. My friend at work who went to the Latin Mass had made some inferences about how the "Novus Ordo" or "New Mass" was highly inferior to the Traditional Latin Mass - which is how all Catholics celebrated the Mass prior to Vatican II, when Latin was replaced with the vernacular and a whole lot of other changes were implemented, like the priest facing the people instead of God, and the tabernacle no longer being placed in the center of many churches, and changes to the words being said during the Consecration. I had no deep understanding of these things - but perhaps he was right? I stopped going to church years ago because I was not getting anything out of it. It was boring. The sermons were bad. Was something indeed missing here? I was very very confused.

*** To Be Continued ***

More Reversion: Looking For God

This post is a continuation of my attempts to write about my reversion back to the Catholic Church. My last post on this topic is here:
The Catholic Mom's Corner: Biblical Revelations

Suddenly things started happening.

1. I was convinced that God was real.

2. I knew that I did not have a close relationship with God and that I hadn't tried hard enough in the past to change this.

3. My Co-worker, who was so kind to me, and was loaning me his books, attended a Traditional Latin Mass (which I had no idea what that was about on any level and wasn't even aware that such a thing even existed in our present age). He had 7 kids who were home-schooled before they joined a co-op/school that was only attended by other Traditional Catholic children who went to his special church. He was absolutely unapologetic and uncompromising about his faith and talking about it at work (when people would ask, but not to people who didn't care to hear). He did not watch any rated "R" movies, and didn't have any interest when I would talk about the cool new movie I had seen that weekend. I was internally floored when he mentioned that The Sound of Music was one of their family favorites. Needless to say, I was smart enough to not mention my book collection (see my last post in this series). All the females in his household were modest dressers, skirts below the knees, yet were stylish, normal and very well adjusted people, despite any prior stereotypes I may have held out of ignorance, about homeschoolers. His teenage daughters were not allowed to date the same way that I did in high school... for instance, they were only allowed to go out in groups, and if they wanted to have an actual "date" with a friend of the opposite sex, they had to take one of their much younger siblings with them! I had never met anyone like this before, and I was frankly, fascinated, with him and his family. I asked a lot of questions and he was very open with me.

4. "The Lord" vs. "Our Lord". Now that I could chime in a little with all the Anne Catherine Emmerich discussions going on, I quickly realized that my friend always referred to "The Lord" (which is what I would always say), as "Our Lord". I just couldn't bring myself to say "Our Lord", it felt too personal and too uncomfortable for me. I tried it once, and I felt as if I hadn't earned the right to say "Our Lord", because He wasn't really mine. Isn't that sad?

5. I started praying in the morning in the shower a simple, "God, please show me who you are. I have no idea. Are you even there?"

6. I wandered into a local Catholic book store and picked up a book on Padre Pio (my Grandmother had mentioned him before, and the stigmata seemed interesting...) and a book called No Wonder They Call It the Real Presence  - I was still wondering about that whole veiling before the Blessed Sacrament thing, I just didn't get it, but was on the verge of discovering a whole new sub-culture below the radar of the comfortable "Catholic" world that I had known my whole life.

As always, there is much more to say, so I shall return... !

Click HERE to continue the story.

Biblical Revelations

In my last post I explained how I got my hands on Volume 1 of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich's Biblical Revelations.

I am a reader and always have been. I love non-fiction, and anything that tells a story about something that has actually happened or can expose some kind of truth, especially a shocking one, is especially appealing to me. Up to this point, I had always been attracted to the dark and macabre. For example, during this time, I can think back and one book that I "couldn't put down" was "A Child Called It" by Dave Pelzer. This is a horrifying autobiography of the worst child abuse case in California history and a mother who forces her own son to eat his own vomit, excrement, and bleach, amongst tales of brutal beatings and mental abuse. Sounds nice, right? The other book I had somehow found was, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper by Diablo Cody, which tells of the real life experiences of the 24 year old neophyte author, as she works in the underground sex arena as a stripper, at a peep show, and for a sex hot line just for fun. You get the idea...

So, I'm pretty open minded, great thing... I pick up Volume 1 of this 2500+ page epic 4 set book which pretty much chronicles main events from the entire Bible, touching on Creation and earlier Old-Testament stories and focusing heavily on the life of our Blessed Mother, and the entire life of Jesus Christ. I know its religious, and I know the Good Catholic people at work are loving it. I decide, what the hell, right? Let's see what the big fuss is about.

I start reading the first chapter, and you know what? IT IS REALLY GOOD! The stories are vaguely familiar, they are our common Bible stories that we all know, but they are infused with great detail and insight and truth. I quickly find that Anne Catherine Emmerich's private revelations are very interesting and very readable. I am surprised that not only is this not at all boring, but extremely easy to read and even enjoyable. (Imagine the Bible re-written as a New York Times Modern Best Seller.) I found that I couldn't wait to get home every day from work so I could read a few more chapters in Volume 1. There were even parts that were appealing to my "dark side" - because she speaks in so much detail about false gods and how people from earlier times loved to worship them and what detrimental effect this has on their souls. It is all very fascinating.

Anyway, there's a lot I could write because it took months and months to read. And in fact, before I would finish all 4 volumes, I would indeed come full circle back into the Catholic Church with a force that I would have never even known was possible. But it is the kind of thing that you don't really ever want to end, and when it does you are a little sad. I remember telling my sister on the phone, trying to explain this new book I was reading, and not doing it any justice, just saying, "I don't really know how to explain this, but I think I am going to become religious..." I remember her saying something like, "Well... Good, I guess..." I started to slowly realize that reading tabloids was a waste of time, and reading things like the aforementioned books about sexual deviancy and child molesters and abusers were interesting, yes, but perhaps not really necessary, perhaps even less than what God would want... Months later, many of the books in my personal collection would be given away or donated to Goodwill. I remember giving away Candy Girl to a younger co-worker, a recent graduate with a nose-ring at my job who thought the author was "cool". I remember saying "Here, you can have this book. I don't want it back." (Maybe I shouldn't have encouraged her, but at the time, it seemed like an OK thing to do.) What should we do with books in this type of situation? Burn them? Throw them out? At the time, I just wanted to pass them onto someone else and get them out of my possession.

Writing out this story is difficult for me. First of all, it has been almost 5 years ago and the order of events tend to overlap, so I am trying to maintain the integrity of my details. And more importantly, I am afraid that it is boring and that nobody particularly cares. I'm going on and on about minutiae. A couple of people have mentioned that I should write this story down, but there are so many small details that have come together to make this all possible, it is not easy to capture everything succinctly. Anyway, if this even serves to help or entertain one person, it will be worth it! I appreciate the encouraging comments I have received thus far.

Next time I will explain further either how the Traditional Latin Mass began to arouse my curiosity and how I first began to pray and seek God even without knowing what I was doing in
The Catholic Mom's Corner: More Reversion: Looking For God

The Journey of a Thousand Miles

If you are just stumbling on this post, it will make more sense if you read Part 1 of my story:
The Wedding Invitation That Changed My Life

I hope you didn't decide to abandon me, dear reader, for being a horrible person. It's not that I was (or am) completely horrible. I think it has more to do with being raised in today's secular culture where our worth and our sense of accomplishment is often dictated by the size of our home, how big our flat screen TVs are, how successful we can be at work, how much money we make, and how thin we are.. things like that.   I was the one who always wanted to be popular, but never quite fit in. I am very vain and always wanted to be physically beautiful, but in reality, I am pretty darn average on my best days. I am insecure and have always compensated for my perceived short-comings with sarcasm and cynicism and judgement. I might not be gorgeous, but I can be smart. I may not have joy in my heart, but who needs that when I am so successful at my career? There just wasn't much room for God in my life. Not that I didn't believe in God, I just was doing things my way and on my terms, and was an extremely selfish and wounded person trying to "keep up with the Joneses". My daughter was going to receive her sacraments because "that's what Catholics do"... even though we were not even going to church. In fact, you could count on one hand how many times we had been to a Catholic Mass since our wedding day 7 years prior to this point!

And so here we are.

Because even though I didn't go to that wedding, the invitation, and the people behind it and what they stood for, changed me somehow over the course of the following year. Everyday I had to come to work, I was in an environment where I felt unsure of myself and very out of place. Surrounded by many deeply Christian individuals who were so simple and joyful and at peace with themselves and their faith.

And what was so special about this "Blessed Sacrament" that would cause someone to cover their head?

Somewhere in the very back of my mind a little voice kept asking that question.

Why was that so threatening to me?

I really didn't want to answer that question!

As the days passed, I kept quiet and listened to the Bible conversations going on around me and I learned to accept it. At some point being surrounded by faithful people makes you act a little more righteous. There was no competition, no gossip, no back stabbing, no racy jokes or inappropriate innuendos, it just wasn't what I had ever been used to. The men around me were all married and faithful to their wives. God was important, their families were important. They were also very smart. Masters Degrees in Engineering and PhDs. I was taking mental notice.

Several of them had begun reading "Biblical Revelations" by Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich. They talked about it every single day. This is a huge 4 volume set you can buy from Tan books.
Here's a link in case you want to see what I'm talking about. I wasn't about to spend the money for something like this by someone that I had never heard anything about, but at one point I was making casual conversation with my co-worker and said to him, "Well, everyone else is reading this, you are going to have to let me borrow it one of these days..."

I think I was being more polite than serious, but as you can probably guess...

I came to work a few days later and Volume 1 was sitting on my desk... My co-worker was loaning it to me, as he had now moved onto Volume 3.

I will continue my story in a future post about how reading this book immediately began to touch, well melt might be a better word, my heart.